


The Adventures of Princess Pineapple

by basking



Category: Final Fantasy XIII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:24:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basking/pseuds/basking
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dajh imagines Vanille as a superhero.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Adventures of Princess Pineapple

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zacks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zacks/gifts).



Dajh creates Princess Pineapple six months after he’s reunited with his father.

Sazh gets to see the very first portrayal of Princess Pineapple at four in the morning after Dajh climbs into his bed and yells, “Daddy, Daddy, I drew a new superhero!” He’s been on a superhero kick for the last six months—first he turned Sazh into Dino Daddy (a compliment of the highest caliber considering Dajh’s admiration for dinosaurs), then he turned Lightning into Lightning Girl (Hope laughed on and off for an hour), and last month he made Snow into The Snow Storm (Serah made him a cape and Lightning snickered on and off for three days).

The newest superhero is Vanille.

The hair—the outfit— Admittedly, there’s more water than watercolors on the page, and Dajh doesn’t really have a good grasp on proportions yet (her head is huge and her arms are twice as long as her legs), but he got her smile exactly right. It can only be Vanille.

Sazh knows Dajh is bouncing on the mattress waiting for a reaction, but Sazh just stares at the picture in his lap and thinks, _her eyes aren’t—weren’t blue. What color were they?_

“Do you know who this is, Dajh?” Sazh asks.

Dajh nods, beaming. “Her name is Princess Pineapple, Daddy.”

“Princess…Pineapple.”

“Yep!”

“Oh.” He shows Dajh a smile. “Well, I like her hat.”

“Thanks! It’s a pineapple!”

“Shouldn’t she have a crown?”

“She does. It’s under the pineapple.”

“Got it,” Sazh says, laughing. “So what’s Princess Pineapple like?”

“She’s really brave. She sneaks out of her crystal castle every night and fights the bad guys with her magic staff, see? This. But during the day it turns into just a regular staff so no one can find out her secret identity. And this—“ he flips the paper over to show Sazh an even more distorted likeness of Fang “—that’s her best friend, Princess Pomegranate. She’s a normal princess, but she can talk to monsters. And she goes with Princess Pineapple on her adventures.”

Sazh imagines Fang’s expression if she could hear this. “She can, huh?” he says. He swallows another laugh and drops an arm around his son’s shoulders. He remembers hero worship, and he’s glad his son has picked better idols than he did at Dajh’s age. Sazh idolized his older cousin who owned a hoverbike and that kid who brought his mother’s cookies to school whenever someone had a birthday.

Dajh’s arms are covered in goosebumps, so Sazh reaches down to the throw blanket he must have kicked to the end of the bed in his sleep and pulls it up just below Dajh’s chin. “What does she say to the monsters?” he asks.

“Lots of stuff,” Dajh answers. “But mostly she just orders them to attack the bad guys.”

“Have they been on any adventures yet?”

Dajh snatches the paper and jumps off Sazh’s bed. “Nope! But they’re about to go on The Adventure of the Pink Platypus! I’ll be back in an hour!”

Sazh chuckles and sinks back into his pillow, but the fabric’s gone cold and the sun’s streaming in between the curtains now anyway, so he gives up on sleep. He gets dressed and heads to the kitchen for coffee, passing Dajh’s room on his way and overhearing dialogue from Princess Pineapple’s upcoming adventure.

 

_Volume 1, pages 2-4_

“can you hear that Pom?! its the robot!!!” whispered Princess Pineapple.

“ya i here it!” Princess Pomegranate replied. She peered around the marble column at the fifty-billion-mile-high robot.

“we godda go save the pandas!!” Princess Pineapple said.

Princess Pomegranate nodded, her expression solemn. “ok!!!”

“quick,” said Princess Pineapple. She lifted her magic staff and prepared to fight the robot. “make the parots miss up the pipe!!”

“ok!!!” Princess Pomegranate jumped twelve feet in the air and yelled, “go parots!!!!!”

At her command, ninety gazillion parrots dive-bombed the robot.

 

Living on Pulse hasn’t been easy. They were the first family to move to Oerba, and Sazh has worked every day since then getting others from Cocoon settled in houses both here and in towns nearby. Sometimes he thinks it would be simpler to convert Cocoon from something functioned into something functional, but mostly he’s just happy to see Dajh enjoying Pulse. Sprinting across open fields of grass that have never been mown or sprayed with chemicals, swimming back and forth underneath waterfalls, catching fireflies in the clear bottles that used to hold milk from the new dairy farmer in the neighboring town of Naemi.

There aren’t any other kids on Pulse yet, so Hope is the closest thing Dajh has to a playmate. To Hope’s credit, though, he’s great with Dajh. One night when Sazh had to help Lightning and Snow divert an adamantoise heading toward Oerba’s outer fence, Hope stayed with Dajh and distracted him from the shouting and gunfire outside by showing him how to bind pages together to make the spine of a comic book.

Now Dajh spends entire afternoons making comic books for Princess Pineapple and Princess Pomegranate.

Snow pretends to be sad about it whenever he sees Dajh. “When do I get my comic book, Dajh?” he’ll usually ask. “Do I get one soon?”

And Dajh always says, “Maybe!”

Sazh thinks it’s because he once said something offhand to Dajh about being vague if you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. He should revisit that lesson, he knows, but for now he’s too amused by Snow’s reactions.

After Dajh finishes volume two, Sazh decides it’s worth taking the opportunity to sneak in some assistance with phonics and occasionally interrupts Dajh and sometimes Hope’s performances of Princess Pineapple’s adventures to correct a grammar slip. Dajh doesn’t always seem to hear him, but Sazh notices some lessons sticking over time.

He gets used to seeing Vanille’s face tacked up on the walls of Dajh’s room.

By summer, Dajh has made four Princess Pineapple comic books, and he’s halfway into the fifth when tragedy strikes.

He shows up on Sazh’s bed at three in the morning, and his sniffling wakes up Sazh.

“Dajh,” Sazh groans, “I told you not to work at night.” It seems insane that he’s having this conversation with his seven-year-old.

“Daddy,” Dajh says in the miserable tone of someone who’s lost a beloved pet or fought with a close friend, “I’m out of paper and glue.”

“Oh, for—”

But he’s not entirely heartless, and even though it’s three in the morning and his son is crying over stationary, Sazh sits up and pulls Dajh into his arms. “We’ll go up to Cocoon next week and get you some more, all right?”

“But—”

“I can’t go this week, Dajh. There are seven new families in Oerba and—”

“Can I go with Hope?”

It’s three in the morning and Dajh is crying over stationary, so Sazh says, “Sure.”

 

_Volume 4, pages 8-9_

“your my best freind,” said Princess Pomegranate, smiling.

“so are you,” said Princess Pineapple. “but we hav too fite that monstor allagater!!!!”

“ya!!!!” agreed Princess Pomegranate. “lets ask my freinds too help us!!!”

“ok!! ill ask my freinds too!!!” Princess Pineapple said. “weres the snow storm??!”

“HERE I AM!!!!!!” said the Snow Storm as he plummeted from the sky on his flying snowbike. “LETS GO FITE!!!!!!”

“ya!!”

 

The crystal supporting Cocoon can’t be seen in detail from Oerba. Sometimes the sun pours through the crystal and makes it look like a mirage, and sometimes, when it rains or snows, it’s completely invisible. The day Hope takes Dajh back to Cocoon for art supplies (“Hope said it’s a new market that the robots don’t control! Do you remember the robots from my comic, Daddy?”) Sazh stands on the roof of their house and watches them grow smaller and hazier in the summer sunlight.

They don’t return until nightfall.

When Sazh goes with Lightning and Serah to address some neighbors’ issues with the water supply, Sazh leaves most of the talking to Lightning, which says everything about his state of mind. His imagination is running full-throttle producing scenarios of broken limbs and resurrected enemies and overexcitement leading to unintentional abandonment. When he hears Dajh’s voice and Hope calling, “Dajh, wait, that’s not your house!” Sazh turns around just in time to catch Dajh and lift him into a hug.

“Hey!” he says, grinning. Dajh has a new backpack and it seems to be full, making him cumbersome to hold. “Hmm.” He raises an eyebrow at Hope, who shrugs.

“He got a lot of new stuff,” Hope says, “so I got him something to carry it in.” Then, because he seems to think Sazh is annoyed with him, he adds, “Snow got him pastels.”

Sazh’s other eyebrow joins the first near his hairline. “Snow went with you?”

“We met him and Serah at the market,” Hope says. “I’ve only been to the market once since it opened last month and I couldn’t find the art booth, so they showed us. And Snow said he’d get Dajh a pastel set if Dajh made a comic about him.”

“Yep!” confirms Dajh. He’s kneeling on the grimy floorboards using his new backpack as a ground easel for his new sketchbook. He’s already got Princess Pineapple sketched out in pink pastel.

The woman who owns the house is only half listening to Lightning explain that she and her husband have been using the water system incorrectly. She’s smiling at Dajh.

Lightning looks like she’s getting a migraine, probably because she’s assuming she’ll have to repeat all this once Dajh is out of range.

“C’mon, Dajh,” Sazh says.

Hope stays to help Lightning, and before they leave, Dajh wraps both arms around Hope’s waist and says in a carefully enunciated half-shout, “Thank you for taking me to the market today, Hope.”

Hope looks amused and says, “No problem, Dajh.”

The woman is now openly beaming at Dajh, and Lightning is starting to look twitchy, so Sazh hustles Dajh out the door.

Once they’re outside, they’re met with a spectacular view of the crystal. The moon sits directly behind it, bisected by the narrow structure. Just above the moon’s position are Fang and Vanille.

Dajh is humming, trying to sketch as he walks.

“Hey, Dajh,” Sazh says.

“Yeah, Daddy?”

“Can Dino Daddy be in volume five?”

Dajh nods without hesitating. “Sure! He can help Princess Pineapple and Princess Pomegranate fight the three-headed robot!”

Most of Dajh’s superheroes are indistinguishable from their real life counterparts. The Snow Storm is loud and relentlessly cheerful, and Lightning Girl never smiles except around the Snow Storm’s girlfriend, Miss Flower. But Princess Pineapple and Princess Pomegranate’s personalities are entirely fictional.

“Hey, Dajh,” Sazh says again, resting a hand on Dajh’s head.

“Yeah, Daddy?”

“Do you want to know what the real Princess Pineapple was like?”

Dajh peers up at him without dislodging Sazh’s hand. He’s grinning with his teeth showing. “Yeah!”

Sazh starts with the train.

**Author's Note:**

> This began as a story of Sazh telling Dajh about Vanille, but then superheroes got involved somehow. Then Dajh snuck in here and stole the show a bit, but I think Vanille in turn stole the show from him, so I think it worked out in the end. It was a lot of fun to write, and I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> Happy holidays, Zacks!


End file.
